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Last month, Asos sold a majority stake in Topshop to Danish fashion group Heartland. In turn, the new owners hinted at a return to physical retail. Millennials across the UK rejoiced.
“The indie sleaze in me when I hear Topshop stores are coming back,” 37-year-old creator Betty Glue captioned a TikTok video, wearing a leopard print fur coat. “I just want a four-storey flagship. Is that too much to ask?” The video garnered almost 270,000 views and over 46,000 likes.
Glue, who moved to London aged 19 and works in the music industry, describes Topshop as an “institution”. “I am so excited for Topshop to return. It felt like the only high street shop that made kind of alternative fashion but also at the same time, it catered for everyone,” she says. “It was all encompassing. Everyone had a place there.”
She isn’t alone. With its genre-defining Kate Moss collaboration, its experiential curated stores (with whole sections divided by trends and aesthetics from boho to indie) and its tie-ins with British luxury labels like JW Anderson, Meadham Kirchhoff and Christopher Kane, for scores of millennials and older Gen Zs, Topshop was the pinnacle of British fashion. And while its influence has ebbed and flowed over the last decade, amid its financial collapse in the late 2010s and ultimate sale to Asos in 2021, a recent surge in ‘Britishcore’ has propelled Topshop lore online. In May, following the release of British film Saltburn (which was set in the noughties and featured many Topshop pieces), searches for Moss’s Topshop collections rose 45 per cent month-on-month on Depop, according to Vogue.
Asos sold a 75 per cent stake in Topshop (equivalent to £135 million) to Heartland — an arm of Bestseller, the Danish fashion business owned by Asos majority shareholder Anders Povlsen. Bestseller operates 2,800 retail stores in 30 countries, with brands like menswear label Jack Jones and women’s brand Vera Moda in its stable. Heartland declined to comment but said in a joint statement with Asos at the time that the company plans to reinstate topshop.com. There’s also talk of a return to physical retail, Asos confirmed.
Consumers are thrilled, while some analysts and brand experts are confident that with the right positioning, Topshop 3.0 could bear fruit. But in the middle of an economic downturn and a challenging retail environment, can Topshop fully return to its former glory?
Competing in a new fast fashion arena
“Much has changed since Topshop’s heyday. It’s hard to bring back a brand, especially to a new consumer cohort,” says Adam Cochrane, general retail and luxury equity research analyst at Deutsche Bank. “Topshop should be positioned as the most fashion-forward brand possible with frequent range changes and short lead times. It was not the cheapest option. Fashion credibility has to be the focus rather than just the lowest price. There are too many competitors at the low price point now.”
He’s not wrong. In the last two years, in addition to domestic players such as Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing, online ultra-fast fashion brands like Shein and Temu have skyrocketed in the UK. For example, Chinese low-cost ultra-fast fashion retailer Shein boasted $2 billion in British revenue in 2023, despite criticisms over the brand’s ethics.
Topshop was the first high street player to align with luxury fashion and really started the high-low fashion macro-trend that’s now pulsing through the industry. “Before Topshop, high-low was undiscovered. So you were either a customer of designer brands, or you were a contemporary or fast fashion customer, and that’s what you bought,” says retail analyst Robert Burke, who’s been following Topshop since before its US expansion in the 2000s; it launched in luxury department store Barneys in 2007 (and sold in Selfridges in the UK). “The idea that Barneys — the temple of cool, high luxury fashion — would have Topshop, sent a major message that reverberated through the market. It was available to people of different incomes,” says Burke. “[Then Topshop owner] Philip Green realised that they were not just going to compete by price, they were going to compete by being stylish, being on the edge, and yes, they were a little bit more costly, but people were willing to pay more.”
Topshop was spotted in magazines like Vogue, on celebrities like Alexa Chung and Pixie Geldof, and on the runway at London Fashion Week, but the difference was, regular people could buy it (albeit for a slight premium versus other high street players). Lauren Gillvray, aged 24, worked in Topshop Doncaster from 2016 to 2018, her first job when she was 16 years old, which she’s posted about nostalgically on TikTok. “Topshop always felt very luxurious compared to other high street brands because it was so aligned with high fashion,” she tells Vogue Business.
But in its later years, Dazed fashion features director and long-time Topshop fan Emma Davidson feels the brand aligned too readily with lower-cost competitors and lost its strong vision. “I think the reason Topshop started going out of favour was because Asos, Zara and H&M, plus Primark and Shein, were pushing prices so low that Topshop followed. Quality plummeted and the design wasn’t as directional. It shouldn’t try to keep up with the high street if it wants to succeed this time around,” says Davidson.
Topshop should be about fashion
Experts agree that Topshop should try to regain its elevated, fashion-forward positioning to stand out today. “When I left Topshop in 2017, it was profitable with a turnover of over £1 billion. Could it be revived? I absolutely think it could,” says Mary Homer, who was managing director of Topshop for just over a decade. “When Asos bought Topshop in 2021, I think it got lost among the other brands [on the platform]. And losing a physical retail presence hasn’t helped either. But there is still a gap in the market, 100 per cent. Teams need to ask what does today’s customer want that they can’t get?”
Design will be crucial to its success. “Topshop was successful because it had a fashion point of view and a ‘cool factor’,” says Burke. “It was a little more expensive than fast fashion, but it was a cool, rock ‘n’ roll, British-inspired fashion,” he says. “Topshop should not be about basics, it should really be about fashion.”
“Especially from the mid-2000s to 2012, Topshop’s design was shit hot,” Davidson echoes. “The prices were pretty decent. And the store was so special. It was the gathering point. It was the first place that you’d look if you needed something. And then if you couldn’t find it, maybe you’d go to H&M or Zara. Topshop was the pinnacle — it felt slightly elevated from the high street.”
Returning to physical retail
Another focus, experts agree, should be experiential, bricks-and-mortar retail. In its heyday, Topshop had over 300 stores in Britain, 11 in the US and 100 international outlets (all franchises) in APAC, Europe and Latin America. Asos controversially shuttered the brand’s Oxford Street flagship soon after purchasing the brand, which legions of millennials mourned online (the store has since been replaced with central London’s first Ikea).
Davidson wrote an ode to the store on Dazed when it closed. “When I moved to London, I was interning in Mayfair with a designer and I didn’t have any money to go out and make friends. So a lot of my evenings, if I wasn’t working in a bar, I would go to Topshop Oxford Circus to try stuff on and kill time, it was like a refuge,” she says. “There was nowhere like Topshop. It was so directional and switched on to fashion in a way that other stores weren’t.”
“I don’t know if the flagship Oxford Street store could ever really be beaten,” adds content creator Glue. “If you wanted a cupcake, a tattoo, a new outfit or a haircut, you could do it all in there and come out of the store a new person. It had it all. A new [Topshop] store needs to have the same feeling.”
Returning to physical retail is a “non-negotiable”, for Topshop, Burke says. “Trying to relaunch through just online or through a wholesale partner is never going to work, they’re never going to be able to express the brand identity.” It’s essential the brand shows up in key cities with dynamic retail concepts, with strong local collaborations and buy-in from local talent, he adds.
Social media consultant Laura Ridgers worked at Topshop from 2009 to 2010, arguably around the brand’s golden era. She says its success was down to visual merchandising, a strong high-quality basics offering to complement the fashion, and store assistants like her who lived and breathed the brand and were keen to give style advice. “Topshop was the only place where you could go in and you could find something that suited most people at that point. We used to have people come in and be like, ‘I’m going to a party and have no idea what to wear.’ And you could look at a person and think, ‘This trend would work for you.’ The visual merchandising was so strong back in that era of Topshop. Whereas now, I just feel like most high street stores don’t have that.”
“I think bringing back the fun and bright feel back to the store is important,” says Gillvray. “Not many high street stores have staff interacting with customers anymore. At Topshop you would always get a more personal and fun experience. The store always had the best energy and I loved engaging with the customers. There was always such a good buzz on the shop floor.”
Who is the customer now?
If Topshop has so much potential, it begs the question, why did Asos sell? Asos purchased Topshop in February 2021 when there was strong growth in online retail and a shift towards more casual categories, which prompted lower returns rates and a spike in profits, says Deutsche Bank’s Cochrane. But post-pandemic, sales slumped and returns rates skyrocketed as consumers went back to categories like partywear. The combination of these saw Asos’s profitability tumble. And the sale of the 75 per cent stake in Topshop/Topman is an “elegant solution” to help reduce its net debt to a more manageable level and allow Asos to keep selling the brand, potentially benefiting from its revival. “The 25 per cent ownership may provide some upside opportunity if the sales of Topshop prove stronger than expected,” Cochrane says.
Now, as it branches out of Asos, Topshop’s new majority owners need to consider who the audience is. The brand currently has 12 million Instagram followers, many of them legacy followers, Ridgers says, so the engagement is very low (based on likes and comments of recent posts). To scale on Instagram and to win on Tikok, the brand will need to invest in video looking ahead, and place creators at the forefront of the brand. “UK brands are good at working with creators, but none have powerful long-term ambassadors like Topshop had,” she says. “Topshop should work with a selection of diverse British creators who can really represent the brand, inspire old and new audiences and help with storytelling.”
The focus should be millennials, and if it goes too hard on Gen Z and the micro-trend cycle, Topshop may not regain resonance, experts agree. “They have two options,” says Topshop alum Ridgers. They either go back to what they used to do and follow a more traditional route, with fashion shows and longer trends cycles, or they can go for the fast and furious social media cycle. But if they want to hit millennials and go for that nostalgic Topshop audience, I feel [the former] would be more successful.”
“Topshop was really good at tapping into trends and getting them out pretty fast while still maintaining quality and being slightly different from everyone else,” Davidson says. “But the churn of trends is so quick now, by the time Topshop comes back, trends like Britishcore could be waning.”
Rather than trying to fit in with the micro-trend cycle, tapping into its indie sleaze, noughties heritage to win back the millennial shopper would likely help Topshop chime with Gen Z anyway. From blokecore and Britpop to Y2K, young consumers today are inspired by fashion eras they didn’t even live through, based on nostalgic content they see online.
Homer agrees that Topshop should lean on its heritage and the emotion it evokes in its fans. “There’s a very big difference between carrying the name of a brand and an actual brand,’ she says. “The difference is, there was an emotion attached to Topshop. Whereas other brands, you just go and you shop and you think, ‘Oh, you know, I’ll go and have a look.’ You can’t get that emotion anywhere else.”
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